


Across the endless sea

by bauble



Category: Inception (2010)
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-08-14
Updated: 2018-08-14
Packaged: 2019-06-27 06:13:41
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,014
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15679632
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bauble/pseuds/bauble
Summary: Written for Inception Reverse Bang, inspired by Bunnie'sgorgeous art.





	Across the endless sea

**Author's Note:**

  * Inspired by [Masquerade](https://archiveofourown.org/external_works/406377) by Bunnie. 



> Written for Inception Reverse Bang, inspired by Bunnie's [gorgeous art.](https://dumbimps.livejournal.com/119217.html#cutid1)

"May I have this dance?"

Arthur turns to face the woman speaking to him and lowers his champagne glass. "I think that's my line."

"You seemed so lonely." She takes his hand. Her skin is silken smooth, cool against his. "Are you looking for someone?"

"I must be," Arthur replies, and the words echo strangely in his chest. He allows her to lead him to the center of the ballroom, all the while scanning the crowd for a familiar face. Most are covered by masks—including that of his dance partner—but he recognizes none even amongst the ones which are bare. "I don't know anyone here, though."

"Do you often attend parties where you don't know any of the guests?" the woman asks as they stand together, waiting for the next song to begin. "Or is this a special occasion?"

"I try not to make a habit of it." Arthur smiles down at her. There's something tickling at the back of his mind--something familiar about the shape of her face, the fall of her golden hair. Something familiar with no name and no form.

"You're a very good liar," she says as he guides her into a close hold. "I bet you do this all the time."

The music plays, and Arthur takes the lead in a Viennese waltz. He hasn't danced like this in years, he thinks, so long ago he's surprised he remembers. 

There'd been that job in Liverpool. He'd been forced to learn over the course of a painful two months, how to quickstep and tango and lead in a passable way to keep the mark's projections busy. The lessons had been close to torturous, everyone else on the team already trained or with no need for training. But the most memorable portion of that job had been discovering the extractor was also a forger--a particularly self-satisfied and arrogant one who'd nearly botched the entire plan with his theatrics. 

Eames, who'd been impatient and irritable and sullen the entire time he'd spent teaching Arthur how to ballroom dance. Eames, who'd pretended to be a projection of a blushing tween girl, sticking to Arthur's side like a burr for the duration of the dream. Eames, who'd smirked at Arthur after it all and said, _Why, Arthur, I had no idea you felt that way._

Eames, whom Arthur had vowed never to work with again, no matter how brilliant, talented, or good in bed he was. 

The footwork for the foxtrot comes back to him with startling ease. As he spins with his partner across the floor he can see more of the room around them: deep wood paneling, luxurious red curtains, gilded mirrors and fixtures. Across the ceiling is an expansive fresco depicting the sea, the sky, and an ensemble of graceful figures smiling down at the guests.

The song ends. Arthur bows politely while his partner executes a perfect curtsy. "Thank you for the dance," he says.

"That's my line." She winks at him, impish and brazen at the same time. "I'd ask you for another, but I know I'm not the one you really want to be dancing with."

"This is a dream," Arthur says, and as soon as he does, he knows it to be true. "What I want is to know what's going on."

"No one's going to hurt you," she says, seeming unsurprised, unfazed by his assertion. "And no one's here to steal."

"Why should I believe you?" Arthur asks, adjusting the cuffs of his cream jacket, wondering whether he should dream up something dangerous, something that could send him back to consciousness. 

"Because you came here willingly." She slips away in the crowd. "Even if you can't remember why yet."

Arthur lets her leave, and takes a moment to evaluate how much danger he might be in. The weight of his die is confirmation of what he already knows—that he's not awake—but it doesn't answer the _why_ or the _who_ or even the _where_. He has no recollection of how he got here, or what he was doing before he went under. 

This should be unsettling, disturbing, and yet—what she said doesn't feel like a lie.

He begins to circulate across the dance-floor, threading through the lavishly dressed people and making note of the exits. Many of the projections pause in their conversations to greet him warmly by name as he passes, seeming not at all perturbed by his blank return stare. Or perhaps they simply can't see his expression clearly, covered as it is by a half-face mask as well. There are too many people that acknowledge him to all be members of an extraction team; the mind (minds?) of whoever he is sharing this dream with clearly knows him. Welcomes him.

"I think I'm lost," Arthur says, tapping the shoulder of a man with a bushy white moustache. "Do you know what's going on here?"

"Well, it's a party, isn't it?" the man replies with a genial laugh. "A time for people to come together in celebration."

"I don't feel much like celebrating," Arthur says, and the man cocks his head to one side. The gesture calls to mind another memory, another job Arthur had takien in Shanghai. All the parties he was to work with were anonymous until his plane touched down—an arrangement he wouldn't have agreed to if he hadn't owed the chemist a favor and desperately needed the work. Then he'd seen the extractor, heard that insufferable, _Arthur, what a delightful surprise_.

The chemist, Zu, had been a portly, balding man prone to leaving his head tilted to one as he scrawled obscure chemical formulas across whiteboards, as if the incline would give him additional insight. Perhaps it had; he'd been the first one to successfully create a compound that allowed for two levels within a dream. Of course, the second level had turned out to be nothing whatsoever like the simulations they'd run—or so Eames had hurriedly reported to Arthur, who'd stayed behind in the first level—and they'd all barely gotten out before the entire job fell apart.

"I feel like I'm missing something," Arthur says slowly, "something I've been missing for a very long time."

"But you can't remember what it is?" the mustachioed man asks, and his eyes are kind.

"It's something very important to me." Arthur's voice grows surer as he goes on. "Something that I came here for."

"You've certainly come a long way." The man's smile is as enigmatic as his words. "Wouldn't do to go home with nothing to show for your trouble."

"But it's a dream. What could I possibly leave here with?"

The man doesn't reply directly, merely pats Arthur on the cheek with one calloused hand. "Cheer up, my boy. I'm sure you'll find what you're looking for soon enough." He melts back into the crowd with no further explanation.

Arthur makes his way to the edge of the room, through an unassuming doorway into a narrow hall. He walks to the end of it, past dozens of closed doors. Stops at one labeled 'Library' in gilded script. 

He puts a hand on the doorknob and hears the release of tumblers on the other side, of locks falling unlocked effortlessly. He turns the knob and pushes, the door swinging open with a gentle creak.

Arthur steps into a magnificent, multistory library filled to the brim with shelves and shelves of books. He peruses a row of titles and realizes that he knows these volumes. "All my secrets," he says aloud, but the room is empty save for him, and no one enters through the door he left ajar.

Whoever engineered this dream doesn't seem interested in any of Arthur's secrets, and he wonders: _if not this, then what?_

He returns to the ballroom, and a woman leaning against the wall speaks. "Good reading?" she asks, the crow's feet at the corner of her eyes deepening when she smiles.

"Nothing I haven't seen before," Arthur says, glancing back. He wonders if anyone will try to enter into the unlocked library. No one does.

"Of course not," the woman says, pushing off the wall and straightening. "You didn't come here to poke around a musty old library."

"Guess not. I came looking for something."

"And when you find this thing, what do you plan to do with it?"

"I—" he hesitates. "I hadn't thought that far ahead yet."

"No plan, Arthur?" She makes a tutting sound, and leans forward to smooth down the front of his jacket, straighten his waistcoat. "Whatever will you do?"

The gesture is motherly, fond, and reminds Arthur of an extractor he'd worked with only a few years ago, after the Inception job. She'd fussed over whether he was eating enough, told Eames to cut his hair, and baked cookies in apology after she walked in on them talking in the break room. Arthur didn't know what the apology was for since they hadn't been doing anything besides talking—were barely even touching beyond the slightest glide of pinky finger against pinky finger beneath the table, too professional for anything more at work. But maybe it was the way Arthur looked at Eames thatgave them away. 

"I'm following the lead of the person that brought me here," Arthur says, pulling back gently. "They seem to have something in mind for me."

"That's quite the leap of faith."

"Maybe," Arthur says, but he's starting to suspect that perhaps it isn't. "Do you know who threw this party, then?"

"A lovely brunette," the woman replies. "Someone who enjoys a good dance or two."

Arthur can't remember a brunette from before, before this dream, and wonders if he should. "Do you know where I could find her?" 

"I think the key," the woman says as she stares over his shoulder, "is to look beyond the masks."

Arthur turns to follow her gaze, but all he sees is a couple dancing by the wall. As he examines them more closely, however, the reflection of the crowd behind them resolves in the mirror, and he sees—

"Eames," Arthur says, and suddenly he remembers: the careful synchronization of the remote-dreamsharing apparatus, the IV, the nod to Dom to hit the switch.

Arthur crosses the room, stops short in front of a beautiful woman in a black dress. She has blue feathers in her hair. "May I have this dance?" he asks, and she ducks her head demurely.

"It would be my pleasure," she replies, high and breathy. But as Arthur sweeps her into his arms, she adds in a voice too low a register, "You found me."

"I always do," Arthur whispers as he presses his nose into Eames' hair, inhaling the scent of roses and champagne. It's not quite right, but it'll do for now.

"You always cheat." 

"And your subconscious is always so handsy." Arthur leads them back onto the dance floor. Eames allows him to guide them into a slow waltz.

"The subconscious wants what it wants," Eames says, admitting nothing and tucking his cheek—the cheek of this forge--into Arthur's shoulder. 

"Why all of this?" Arthur gestures at the room, the detailing. Eames is generally more of an impressionistic dreamer, projections vividly alive while the settings fade into a colorful haze behind them. "Seems like an awful lot of effort when you could have just dreamt up a bed."

"And dispense with all the romance and intrigue?" Arthur can hear Eames laughing against his chest. 

"Since when do you care about romance and intrigue?" The last few times they'd managed to arrange a rendezvous, they'd met in a flurry of frantic kisses and the heated slide of bodies, holding onto each other for as long as they could, greedy for long-denied contact. The meetings began too abruptly and ended far too quickly.

"Since we have longer than ten minutes," Eames says. Arthur remembers this, too: they finally found a compound stable enough to sustain both a remote connection and a dream two levels deep. Enough to stretch their hasty hellos and goodbyes into hours together. 

"You never bothered with any of this when we first met," Arthur says, teasing. "I never knew you had a sentimental streak."

"I know," Eames says, voice low and abruptly serious. "I should have. I should have bothered."

"I have no regrets, Mr. Eames," Arthur says. Eames looks up at him with a faint smile, a stranger's smile with a stranger's face. Arthur feels a pang at that, and guides them towards the mirror so he can catch a glimpse of the real thing.

"Of course not."

"This is a good one," Arthur says, trying to shake the wistfulness off. It's only been three months since he last saw Eames—the real Eames—in a dream. Before that, it'd been six. "This forge, I mean. Is she new?"

"As a matter of fact, she is. A compilation of some of my favorites," Eames says. "You like her?"

"She's stunning," Arthur says.

"Good." Eames pauses. "I wanted to create something worth remembering." 

Arthur cranes his head back to look up at the ceiling, the intricate fresco catching his eye. Even from a distance, he sees the white curls of the sea foam spray, the pearlescent sheen of the oyster shell, the pinked glow of Aphrodite's skin. It must have taken days for Eames to perfect this place--maybe weeks.

Arthur looks back at Eames, expression hidden doubly behind the mask and a stranger's face. "I wouldn't forget."

"It's been over a year and a half, darling," Eames says, voice light and nearly flippant, but Arthur catches the barely perceptible hitch at the end. "No one would blame you if you did."

"The plan will work. It'll work."

_And if it doesn't_ hangs unspoken in the air. "This song is coming to an end soon." Eames looks away, the line of his neck graceful, swan-like. "We could take this elsewhere."

Arthur touches two fingers under Eames' chin to guide his gaze up. "Do you plan to stay like this?"

"I could, if you'd like." Eames shimmers back to his true form a moment later, firm and _male_ beneath Arthur's hands, at eye level once more. "I've also picked up some new faces in the last few months." _In the months we've been apart_.

Arthur still can't see most of Eames' face, covered as it is with the mask he'd been wearing before, grown to accommodate his actual features. But even behind the mask, Arthur can see that Eames' skin has lost its tan, almost sallow now, and there's a gauntness to his jaw. His body feels too thin beneath Arthur's palms.

The selfish desire to see Eames again wells up within Arthur. Arthur entertains the idea of pulling away the mask and running his fingers over Eames' face, rememorizing the eyebrows and cheekbones and nose that exist now solely in the province of faded memories—all photographs having long been destroyed. But after a moment of fantasy, of indulgence, he puts it aside. 

"I think I like your face the best," Arthur says.

"Do you remember when we first met?" The image of Eames shivers in the air once more, and Arthur blinks; it's still Eames, but with minute changes. The line of his jaw is smoother now, five o'clock shadow gone and the scar across his upper lip erased. The body beneath Arthur's hands is more muscular, lean, and Arthur would guess that if he peeked beneath the collar of Eames' black jacket, the curl of his tattoo would be gone. "How young we were?"

"You infuriated me," Arthur says, and chuckles. "You were sloppy and dramatic and all I could think about when I should have been thinking about the job."

"You were so stern, so desperate to be taken seriously." Eames squeezes Arthur's hand, gently. "I hated how you ignored me."

"It was an act of self preservation," Arthur replies. "A drowning man refusing to believe he can't swim."

"And now here we are, at the bottom of the sea, hundreds of miles apart," Eames says, the corner of his twenty-five year old mouth turning downwards. 

The song comes to an end, and Eames glances at the exit. "A dreamt-up bed awaits."

Arthur puts a hand on Eames' chest, and imagines he can feel the dull thud of his heart from oceans away. It would be easy to lose himself to the need, the pleasure, the warmth of Eames' body. It would be easy, the one easy thing in this situation between them--but that's not what Arthur came here for. Not really.

"I miss you," he says, and it's like ripping open a wound that's barely stopped bleeding. "I really—" Arthur halts, throat stoppering up almost painfully. There's so much he can't put into words.

"Arthur," Eames says. "It won't be like this forever. One way or another, I'll—"

"The plan will work," Arthur says, the endless refrain he clings to. "We'll see each other topside, soon."

"When we do, you can tell me all about the death-defying feats you've performed," Eames says. "And I, in turn, will tell you all about the fascinating people I've become. I can now speak excellent Czech in dreams."

"Or you can tell me now," Arthur says as the music begins to play again. "While we have another dance or two."

Eames' forge of his youthful self falls away as he looks at Arthur curiously. "You didn't come here to dance, did you?"

Arthur begins to lead Eames across the dance floor in three-quarter time, the steady rises and falls together familiar, reassuring. "I've never been to the Andes. How is the weather there?"

"Dreadfully cold," Eames says, and he brings a hand up to cup Arthur's cheek, thumb tracing the underside of his jaw for only a moment before it's gone. "You would loathe it completely."

"I think I could find a way to live with it," Arthur says as he presses his cheek to Eames', and feels the faint scratch of stubble against his skin.

fin


End file.
